While embarking on the multi-year journey to draft the
OFL and coordinate
the
expert and community review of the license, we analysed
the needs and the existing models, how they worked and how
people reacted to them. With feedback from the community we
made a list of features which are crucial for good font
licenses and tried our best to condense them all into an
ideal model for both users and designers to build upon.

These key features are:

use, study, modification, redistribution (the 4 core
freedoms)

bundling

embedding and its interaction with possible strong or
weak copyleft requirements

derivative outlines and artwork status

derivative fonts status

artistic integrity

anti-name collision

name and brand protection

reputation protection for authors

preventing stand-alone reselling within huge
collections

descriptive changes of modifications

clarity and readability for designers

awareness of the software nature of fonts

the multiplicity of font source formats, some open and
human-readable and some opaque/binary

good integration with the font design toolkit

legal solidity through wide expert and community review

metadata integration

cultural appropriateness to both the type and
FLOSS communities

stable trustworthy working model with a non-profit
as the steward of the license

being reusable and not project and .org-specific

allowing linking in a web context (more recently)

There are of course differing views along the licensing
spectrum but if you take into account the specific needs of
collaborative font design then your criteria may well be in
tune with the elements above.

With these criteria in mind, and taking into account the
need for reducing licensing proliferation, where do existing
font licensing approaches fit in? The following list has
some of the existing licenses used for fonts out there along
with some quick comments about problems the specific
approach may have.

Don't get me wrong: for other uses many of these licenses
are brilliant and do a fantastic job and I don't want to
ignore the efforts by the corresponding authors or
maintainers but with hindsight it seems there are probably
better ways to release a font under a free software license.

Public domain: no rights reserved not even
attribution, unclear under various jurisdictions which makes
it problematic for a global license, fairly often found to
contain elements from restricted fonts where copyright has been
stripped

Utopia license: project-specific and
organisation-specific and so non-reusable

AFPL: Alladin Free Public License: deprecated and
rejected as non-free by FSF and Debian

Various Creative Commons combinations: designed to be
used for content and not software

Baekmuk License: project-specific and
organisation-specific and so non-reusable

Hershey font license: project-specific and
organisation-specific and so non-reusable

Liberation Font License: project-specific and
organisation-specific and so non-reusable

Bitstream Vera agreement: project-specific and
organisation-specific and so non-reusable

Lucida Legal Notice: project-specific and
organisation-specific and so non-reusable

MgOpen agreement: project-specific and
organisation-specific and so non-reusable, a variation of
the Vera license

Arphic Public License: project-specific and
organisation-specific and so non-reusable, very closely
modelled on the GPL, some clauses are odd in the context
of font design

Design Science License: meant for data and not
software:
not endorsed by the FSF

Mincho License: project-specific and
organisation-specific and so non-reusable

If you know about font designers wishing to release their
creations under a community-validated font-specific license,
then I'd recommend you point them to the OFL FAQ and
use the Go for OFL
campaign materials to advocate a common license which
many in the FLOSS community believe caters better to these
needs.